**5.2. Secondary level**

These *Portfolios* enable the E-Cuber to demonstrate their capabilities to both potential employers and Academia. Who knows they may eventually be regarded as a suitable assessment

The Irish education system is made up of primary, secondary and third-level education. If E-Cubers is to successfully cater for the requirements of Industry 4.0 over the long term it will need to have solutions which appeal to all three of these levels. This is a significant challenge. The promotion of a culture of collaboration and creativity across all three levels of an education system to support an emerging career has simply not been done before. The following

Several E-Cubers **BUILD** workshops were held which engaged more than 100 students between 2014 and 2018. The focus at this level was to determine if the concepts of *Equipment* with *Functions* which can be *Tested* could be imparted with" *ag spraoi agus ag imirt"* as a precursor to understanding OEE. All the workshops utilized LEGO® TECHNIC pull-back racers. They cost approximately €25, have less than 150 pieces. They take less than 30 minutes for an

A very small minority of students were clearly *Dramatists* as opposed to *Patterners* and were totally averse to following the detailed instructions. But most of the students enjoyed the build process even though less than 10% of the boys and less than 2% of the girls had played with LEGO® TECHNIC before. Without exception all the students could understand the fundamental concepts of equipment, functions and testing. But their desire for *imirt* was extremely strong. They wanted to create a competition and that is exactly what we did. We created an *E-Cubers OEE Game* based on the pull-back racers which were conducted over 300 seconds. Each team of two (who had completed the BUILD process) could test the OEE of their racer on a 2-meter-long race track with a defined start line and a defined *"landing zone"*. The three standard components of availability, performance and quality were utilized to calculate OEE and the formula was explained to the students. The performance was calculated based on the number of cycles (attempts to land in the zone), the quality was calculated based on the number of good cycles (attempts which landed in the zone) and the availability was calculated based on how many seconds during the 300 second OEE Game that the equipment was working correctly. Even though there were no prizes on offer the *imirt* really did bring *Passion*

Even though the E-Cubers **BUILD** workshops were extremely successful at achieving the stated objective, several lessons which were learned which should be shared. Do not hold *"free events"* which are open to the public. There will be a significant variation in age groups and capabilities which make them virtually impossible to control. Where possible utilize the

sections outline what was discovered by applying E-Cubers at each education level.

experienced builder to build but a novice can build them in less than 60 minutes.

to the *Project* as they collaborated with their *Peers* to get the highest OEE.

method by Academia? What a different world that would be!!!

**5. Applying E-Cubers to the Irish education system**

**5.1. Primary level**

76 New Trends in Industrial Automation

Secondary Level (or post-primary) education consists of a three-year Junior Cycle (lower secondary), followed by a three-year Senior Cycle (upper secondary), if they take the optional Transition Year (TY). The TY is a critical decision point for young students as they decide on which potential career path to take. E-Cubers designed and implemented a week-long TY-PBWS (Project Based Work Simulation) program with the objective of introducing students to the Equipment Procurement Process (EPP) and outlining the different engineering roles within the equipment engineering team structure.

The TY-PBWS was provided to Coola (mixed-gender), Summerhill College (all-boys) and The Mercy College (all-girls) schools in 2014 and 2015 thus any gender imbalance should be negligible. During the TY-PBWS the students were organized in teams and assigned engineering roles. They had to **BUILD** complex equipment based on the LEGO® TECHNIC 8110 Unimog 400 or 42,030 VOLVO L350F Wheel Loader or the LEGO® MINDSTORMS based MindCub3r which solves the Rubik's Cube. They had to design and successfully execute a Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) and proceed to optimize the design of the equipment. All the teams clearly demonstrated that they could perform root cause analysis, in response to identified incidents. They demonstrated an ability to identify problems and suggest or implement suitable changes. Thus, it can be inferred that, with careful preparation and practical equipment examples, TY students can understand the key principles of both OEE and ITIL® in the equipment domain. 100% of the TY students stated that by taking part in the PBWS they obtained a better understanding of the various roles engineers play in the EPP and how EPPs are executed, while 95% claimed that they got a lot of satisfaction from getting the equipment working, which concurs with the *Constructionism Learning Theory* [33].
